Revenant Crusade (Mephiston Book 2) by Darius Hinks

Author:Darius Hinks [Hinks, Darius]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2018-07-06T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

‘The Horns of the Abyss,’ said Codicier Lucius Antros, looking out from the Dawnstrike’s observation deck. He was surrounded by movement and noise as the Gladius-class frigate edged into position, but his gaze was fixed on the scene outside. His training had revealed many extraordinary and disturbing sights to him over the decades, but this was beyond anything he had yet experienced.

The golden-armoured Space Marine at his side nodded, taciturn as ever.

They stood before what looked like the paint palette of a lunatic. Every conceivable colour, and some inconceivable ones too, had been splashed across the stars. The dazzling hues formed a rippling sea, a sea that was exploding, endlessly – erupting and collapsing, thrashing and recoiling. From a distance, it could have been mistaken for a natural phenomenon – a nebulous, geomagnetic storm that had boiled out of control, magnetic fields colliding and detonating – but this close, only a few hundred miles away, there could be no mistaking the truth: this bizarre manifestation was the death throes of reality. Planet-sized limbs of matter grappled and lashed, creating fleeting, recognisable shapes: tormented, bestial faces, blossoming bundles of viscera, the spires of great palaces, the irises of lidless eyes.

For a moment, Antros was lost in the madness of it, his mind reeling before the cataclysmic conclusion of time and space. The Great Rift was physics in reverse – the ordered universe breaking down into the raw stuff of Chaos.

He looked back at the reason Dragomir had brought him up here: the Horns of the Abyss. The orbital facility that no longer had anything to orbit. Once, it had rested gently in the gravitational pull of Dragomir’s home world, Tocharion, but Tocharion was gone, devoured by the rift, along with the fortress-monastery that Dragomir had once called home. The Sons of Helios were now a refugee Chapter, rootless and homeless.

The Horns of the Abyss was a recent name, of course. Before the arrival of the Great Rift the facility had been called Saarik Station, but as it slipped slowly towards destruction, it had taken on a more sinister persona. The facility consisted of two orbiting spheres, linked by a cage of gantries and struts. Each of the spheres was several miles in diameter, peppered with anchorage points and weapons batteries, but the close proximity of the Great Rift had warped and mangled them, giving the station the appearance of a leering, horned skull. It hung over the madness of the Cicatrix Maledictum like a man clinging to a cliff edge. Even now, purposeful, chromatic tendrils surrounded it, preparing to drag it down into the hellish blaze.

The Chapter Master was bathed in warp light. His burnished, master-crafted armour reflected the madness of the storm, blazing crimson and sapphire, making it hard to see him clearly. He had removed his helmet and Antros was once again taken by the strangeness of his tattoos. Every Sons of Helios battle-brother wore a tribal-looking design on his face, but the Chapter Master’s was by far

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